Among the various storage vendors (and network vendors, and server vendors, and what the heck, all of IT infrastructure hardware and software), one can have a full-time job just following and reading the mountains of press releases. Add to that a few thousand blogs, tweets, and other social networking sources, and it’s easy to see how we can all drown in a sea of information. (And here I am blogging about a press release, but that’s not the point of the blog…read on).
One of the things I love to see is integration. We’re constantly seeing new technology coming to market, and one of my favorites is our Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP), which includes thin provisioning, ease of provisioning, and great performance improvement for random reads.
At Fall SNW, HDS announced version 3 of our Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to expand on our originally named Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP). Why drop the “A”? Well, because it’s no longer just about the archiving. Afterall, the industry has been archiving data for decades so there’s nothing new there.
So here in the U.S. we’re on the eve of one of our largest holidays: Thanksgiving. Most countries have a form of this holiday, on different dates, so it’s not uniquely a United States concept and we probably copied it from somewhere else. But it is cleverly timed, in that it’s always on a Thursday, meaning that most businesses (except retail!) don’t bother to open on Friday as well giving us all essentially a 4-day weekend! It’s a good time for parades, and watching football on TV while overindulging on food and drink.
Welcome Back Barry!
We were all wondering why Barry Burke had been so quiet on the blog circuit for a few weeks and lo and behold, we now find out he was on vacation. Barry, it sounds like you had a good time and I hope you did. South Africa is a beautiful country. And I’m ready for a few weeks off myself. Someday…maybe…perhaps…relaxing on a sandy beach…
Sometimes, when writing these blogs, I start seeing myself as more and more of a “storage historian”. Maybe I’ll petition someone within HDS to have my title changed. Well, maybe not; who really needs one?
In my strange and wonderful tenure in this weird storage industry of ours, I’ve seen a lot of things (fads, hypes, and promises) come and go. And in that time, I’ve also developed (what I think is) a healthy sense of cynicism that comes with failed promises and predictions. Is “hype curve” one or two words?
By: Claus Mikkelsen on July 20, 2009
I’ve been on this “Mission from God” (with all due respect to Messrs Aykroyd and Belushi, Blues Brothers, circa 1980) over the past few months to promote the additional benefits of HDP.
There is an interesting post by Chris Mellor at Channel Register entitled:
There has been so much discussion in the past 2 weeks over Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) and the size of our pages which are, by comparison, large when compared to other thin provisioning implementations. As we all recall from our first course in Computing 101 and memory management, larges pages in memory provide better performance but at the expense of using more capacity. In the “olde” days of extremely expensive memories, large pages were considered a very bad thing. Now let’s look at this phenomenon as it applies to storage, and we see a different argument since: (1) the scale of costs is dramatically different, (2) we’re only looking at disk access, not the majority of I/O which is typically satisfied out of cache, and (3) in our HDP implementation, we actually can use the entire 42 MB page depending on whether the next WRT is sequential or random. I won’t rehash all the arguments here; you can read them all in Hu’s blog, Marc Farley’s, Nigel Poulton’s (replete with video; nice touch, Nigel!), not to mention Tony Asaro’s this morning.
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